Patching 1.0.2c -- potentially nerfed mob damage

[Lissa]

There were a ton of skills that were hotfixed, but never mentioned in the actual patch notes because they had already been hotfixed it. Look at Strafe for instance which in 1.0 was uncapped in the number of arrows that could be used against a single target. They hotfixed that as well and capped the number of arrows that could go into a single target to 3 IIRC, might have been less. I know before the capped it, Strafe was the Amazon's great boss killer as I used it to great affect on the end act bosses.

Strafe was popular because it was massively bugged before 1.04. Your shining example of Blizz QA in those days is they fixed one of the two major bugs that affected a skill?

The strafe bug is what made the Amazon viable prior to 1.04... because of the bow bug... So again, they fixed one of the major bugs with strafe, which was cool, but two other major bugs effectively neutered all other Bow Amazon skills and kept Strafe as reasonably viable.

Essentially every Bowazon ability other than Strafe was horribly bad, due to the bow bug, but thanks to the strafe bug, Strafe was not horribly bad... Depending on the DEX of the Amazon, the Strafe bug largely canceled out the bow bug if an Amazon used Strafe...

So... since these two major bugs largely offset each other and Bowazons weren't completely neutered (in fact they were AWESOME thanks to the strafe bug in co-op with a concentration paladin, because the way the bugs interacted, concentration gave 2-4x the listed damage increase to Strafe) Blizz QA was good back then? 2 offsetting bugs in place for ~5-6 months meant everything was cool, right?

Of course not all Amazon skills were largely neutered. Guided arrow was completely neutered since any more skill points than one in the skill did nothing.
Not almost nothing, not a little bit... nothing. Skill points did nothing in a game where skill points were a primary source of character power.

The bugs in Diablo II were so many and so large that this skill that completely wasted skill points was considered a "minor bug" in the 1.04 patch notes.

These are all bugs that were fixed in patch 1.04... which was 5-6 months after release.

While we may not have yet discovered such bugs in Diablo III, at this point I'm siding with those who think Diablo III is more polished than Diablo II.
Just the fact that the character screen looks to be a reliable source of information is a huge step in the right direction of polish and QA over Diablo II. They seem to be adjusting things on a quicker timescale as well, but that's somewhat debatable. What isn't debatable is the level of polish in the shipped game. Diablo III has fewer glaring bugs and major issues than Diablo II did.

QA is more than just finding and fixing bugs. A lot of people here also don't realize that D3 has been in development twice as long or longer than D2 ever was while having less skills per class (including both active and passive skills) than D2 had across the multiple trees that each class had. The runes do add some changes into the various skills, but the runes don't change the overall way the skill works (just a flavor to the skill). So, they had less to check and more time to check it in, yet numerous skills are not viable, this is a function that QA is s'posed to check, major exploits got through (even though most of the discovered ones were corrected), and for some places in the world (notibly Europe) there have been latency issues (that are still going on from time to time from what I'm hearing). People here are looking at just a single aspect, bugs and bug fixing, while missing the other aspects of QA as well (viability of skills, network issues, and skill synergy that leads to exploitive behavior). Is D3 difficulty stepping up properly from Normal to Hell, sure, but that is not the only function that QA is responcible for and with the time they had to QA this game (atleast a year and half, probably longer), there should not have had some of the issues they've had get through.